


Side Effects

by galactiklance



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (apparently), AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Fluff, Keith floats, Lance is messy™, Love Confessions, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Part Vampire Keith, Potions, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Urban Fantasy, Urban Witchcraft, Vampire Keith (Voltron), Vampires, Witch Lance (Voltron), Witchcraft, Witches, but not down stairs, klance, life advice with keith and lance, remember to read large sharpie instructions, then he breaks bones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-11 04:54:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20147956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galactiklance/pseuds/galactiklance
Summary: “Hey Keith?” He stuck his head around the living room door frame, eyes landing on his, well, not roommate, more apartment-mate, after a few seconds.“Hm?” An overly-large-red-hoodie-clad-Keith asked from his position, half a foot above the floor, book in his lap.This was not unusual. Actually, the book was somewhat out of the ordinary, but the floating wasn’t.----------Lance has lost something. Something vital and highly dangerous if it gets into the wrong hands. Well okay may not but he would kinda really like it back please.





	Side Effects

**Author's Note:**

> Ya yeet I'm here with an impulsive fic instead of my usually scheduled TRWMTTB update (Read it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18429080/chapters/43653152) if you haven't already) 
> 
> Anyways, this was thought up, written, and beta'd in the space of a day, which may I say seems to be some sort of record. Originally supposed to be an exercise for me to practice word limits, this kinda escalated to almost double the intended limit. But hey, what happens, happens. 
> 
> So yeah, I hope you like this, I've been told it's tooth-rotting fluff, which is quite the change from my usual angst.
> 
> HUGEST thanks to Jo, who graciously beta'd this for me, who also has both [AO3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BSforDays/pseuds/BSforDays) and [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/bs_fordays) Go check her out because she is amazing. (Also thanks for teaching me how to add links!!)
> 
> And of course I'm doing a self promo, who do you think I am?? Yeah, I have [Twitter,](https://twitter.com/galactiklance) [Tumblr,](https://galactiklance.tumblr.com/) and [Instagram.](https://www.instagram.com/galactiklance/)
> 
> Right I'll shut up now.

“No, no, no… no no no!” Lance was practically sitting inside the fridge, pulling out bottle after bottle of various liquids, most of them  _ not _ what their containers said they were.

A large sprite bottle was filled with a shockingly blue, viscous broth with a large sticky note proclaiming ‘DO NOT OPEN UNLESS OUTSIDE’. Several water bottles could have been arranged to form a sort-of-rainbow, but none of them, not even the glowing red one, were what Lance was looking for.

Shoving everything back in the fridge and catching a jar of what looked to be snake eggs (they were), Lance stood, huffing. 

“Hey Keith?” He stuck his head around the living room door frame, eyes landing on his, well, not roommate, more  _ apartment _ -mate, after a few seconds.

“Hm?” An overly-large-red-hoodie-clad-Keith asked from his position, half a foot above the floor, book in his lap.

This was not unusual. Actually, the book was somewhat out of the ordinary, but the floating wasn’t.

Because Keith was a vampire. Or, some amount of vampire. He’d never told Lance how much. It wasn’t obvious, he didn’t suck blood or anything (but he did like his meat cooked for like 30 seconds per side), and you had to look  _ really _ closely to see that his ears were pointed, and his cute little fangs only popped out occasionally. Not that Lance thought Keith was cute. No, noooo, nope. 

He was just… aesthetically pleasing. Yeah, that was it. With his super pale skin and his purple eyes (another side effect of being born part vampire), and his long dark hair that even though Lance always insisted was an ugly mullet was actually neither, and- okay Lance snap out of it, you’re trying to find something important, not oogle your housemate. 

“Did… did you have a question?” Keith raised a brow, pushing his reading glasses up his nose. 

“Heh, right, sorry. Uh, have you seen a potion recently, it’s opaque, really light purple, kinda shiny-ish? I put it in the fridge last week but I can’t find it.”

Where Keith was part vampire, Lance was all witch. His speciality was potions, hence the fridge full of strange concoctions. 

They were his speciality because… well… he kinda sucked at casting. Sure, he could do the simple spells pretty averagely, but after creating a new ocean in his childhood bedroom, he decided that maybe he should pursue a different strand of magic.

He’d found ways to make up for charms and enchantments, tackling problems from a potioneer’s angle instead of the typical approach. Some of his solutions were pretty ingenious, if he did say so himself. 

“Maybe if you didn’t hoard stuff in there you’d be able to find things easier. Stuff like actual food. Do you know how long it took me to find a bottle of milk this morning? Five minutes, Lance. Just chuck some stuff out already.” He’d closed his book and taken his glasses off, and was now staring up at Lance with great annoyance. 

“No! I need it all, you wouldn’t understand. It’s  _ important _ .” Lance argued pointedly, crossing his arms and pushing the rolled-up sleeves of his button-up back past his elbows. “So have you seen it or not?”

“Nope.” Keith uncrossed his legs, standing as if he’d been sitting on a really low chair instead of hovering above the carpet. 

At first it had been unnerving, especially in the mornings, when Keith was sans coffee and looked like a corpse floating around the place, occasionally bumping into things.

But after a while, Lance had grown to become used to it, just as Keith had come to tolerate the strange things in the fridge and the constant bubbling of Lance’s cauldron.

Though Lance had to say he still laughed whenever Keith forgot to duck to get into the kitchen. More often than not, he’d hear a dull thunk, followed by a heavy crash, and topped off with a string of highly creative curse words as Keith whacked his forehead on the doorframe and fell to the ground out of shock.

But he never mentioned it, just like Keith never mentioned the times Lance emerged from his room with his eyebrows scorched or face blackened with soot and magic.

Speaking of his room… maybe he’d left it in the cooler in there. 

They couldn’t afford another fridge on the electricity bill, so Lance kept a chilly bin with some icepacks filled with a cooling potion instead of water. They had to be refilled every few months, and it wasn’t as cold as the fridge, but it worked for short-term storage.

Entering Lance’s room was like walking into an apothecary after a hurricane. The windows were usually open, revealing a flower box filled with some of the more unusual plants available as seeds. Things like a mandrake, and belladonna (which had netting over it to stop the pigeons from eating it and dropping from the sky like feathery rocks). The shelves were lined with alternating potted plants, ancient looking books (and some new ones, really, he wasn’t going to ever throw out his Harry Potters, even if they were wildly inaccurate. Though Snape’s methods actually had some truth in them, after a little experimenting), and glass bottles and vials of yet more potions. 

His cauldron sat in the middle of the floor, underneath it a heat producing fire, conjured by his mother specifically so it didn’t burn anything, produce smoke, or go out. It did mean the aircon was on all the time though.

Emptying the cooler in a similar way to the fridge, and checking everything around his room, Lance was still unsuccessful. 

“Just take a break, you’ve been looking all morning.”

The voice startled Lance, and he yelped, almost dropping what was in his hands (luckily he didn’t because if the bottle had shattered, there would no longer be an apartment 422. Or apartment 522, 322, or any adjacent ones either). 

“Keith! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” 

“I’ve been here for nearly three minutes, witchy-boy.” 

The nickname wasn’t one Lance was particularly fond of, mostly due to lack of creativity. But Keith hadn’t been able to come up with literally anything else in retaliation to his nickname, which Lance had created for him a few days after he moved in.

“Yeah, well, I can’t hear your footsteps if you’re floating, can I, fangs?”

Every time he said it, the same thing happened. One of Keith’s hands went up to his mouth, as if he were hiding or checking for the fangs in question. It was adorable. 

“I… I’m not floating, Lance.” He tapped his toes on the floor to prove his point.

Oops. Minus points for observation, it seemed. 

“Right. Maybe… maybe I should take a break then. I’ll just clean up.” He gestured to the mess he’d made during his search.

“I can help. I-if you want.” Keith shrugged from the doorway, chewing his lip.

“Really? That would be great, thank you so much.”

=======•°.*⁺:⋆º⋅༚.⁺*

It didn’t take long to put everything away, and it was nice to spend some time with Keith, Lance found. Well, to spend some time with him that wasn’t spent bickering or in stubborn silence.

“What even was the potion you’re looking for?” Keith asked as Lance flopped onto the sofa with a bowl of cereal (yes, cereal was a perfectly good lunch, thanks very much).

Lance mumbled something incoherent.

“What?” Keith sat on the other end of the couch, actually touching the cushions. Slipping off a couch from sitting and floating were two different things. Where the physical contact with the material had friction to slow you down, floating meant you just fell and landed, hard.

It was similar with stairs, except while you  _ could _ float on a couch, the one time Keith had tried to float down the stairs, he’d fallen down the entire flight and broken his wrist. The elevator wasn’t much more successful, with Keith slowly ending up pressed against the ceiling as his personal gravity failed to keep up with the descending floor.

“I said it was… it was a love potion.” Lance turned his burning face away. 

That made Keith blink. “A… a love potion? Why do you need a  _ lo- _ oh.” His tone had started out teasing, but by the end it was soft and, if Lance wasn’t mistaken, actually a little sad.

“No, nonononono. Not like that, I swear.” Lance sat bolt upright, shaking his head vigorously.

This… also made Keith blink. “Then why do you need it? What else does it do?”

“It’s a base.” Lance answered simply, shrugging and setting his bowl down, readying himself for a big explanation. “So, you brew a simple love potion, nothing special, on its own it’s not that great of a potion, just makes the drinker fall in love with whoever made it until the effects wear off. But depending on what you do with it changes it. So I was letting it sit and chill for a week, then I just add some more ingredients like pink carnations and lavender oil, and I’ve got a devotion potion-”

A snort interrupted his spiel, a snort that lit something up inside of Lance. 

“What?!”

“Sorry,” Keith was still laughing softly. “Just... ‘ _ devotion potion’ _ , it sounds stupid.”

Lance… couldn’t argue with that. Especially with Keith’s  _ laugh _ , holy  _ Hecate _ it was magical.

“Anyways, you get a devotion potion, and then if you like, distill it you get a powder, and then you can use it kinda like pigment in paint and voila, paint it on anything and you won’t be able to lose it. For a while anyway. My old paint kinda died on my keys so I’m making some more.”

Keith looked a little confused. “Why can’t you just charm them?” 

“Ah, I mean, I  _ could _ … but I suck at spellwork. Remember when I melted my first set of keys? Yeah, that was my first and last attempt at charming them.”

Another snort. Another something in Lance’s chest that expanded like a sun fast-forwarded over thousands of millions of years.

“Yeah maybe you should stick to potions then, witchy-boy.”

“Fangs.”

As always, the hand went up to his mouth.

“Do they actually… can you see them?”

“What? No, no, only sometimes, like when you’re really concentrating or you’re super hungry or angry. And anyways… I like them, they’re… cute.”

For a moment, everything was silent. 

“Welp, I’m still hungry so imma go get some more cornflakes. You want any?” Lance stood, scooping up his bowl and spoon.

“I’m fine.” Keith’s voice was quiet, and he still had a hand in front of his mouth.

“Mkay.” Lance shrugged, heading off to the kitchen and refilling his bowl.

It was only when he was looking for milk that he noticed it. An empty carton next to the sink, waiting to be rinsed and recycled, nothing out of the ordinary. 

Except the large letters in thick sharpie demanding that ‘KEITH: DO NOT DRINK’. 

“Oh no. No no nonono.” Lance grabbed the carton and high-tailed it back to the living room, where Keith was still curled up on the sofa. 

“Did you drink this?” He practically shoved the carton in his face. 

“Uh… yeah, I think so. Yeah, I put some milk in my coffee this morning, why?”

“Keith! Can you read?!”

“I didn’t have my glasses on, and it was dark, sorry! What even is it?” Keith raised his voice to match Lance’s. 

“The potion I’ve been missing all morning.”

Lance watched as the reality sank into Keith. Then as the realisation turned to confusion. 

“You must’ve done something wrong because literally nothing has changed except my coffee was sweeter.”

“I- you- wha-“ Lance was at a loss. “Are you accusing me of stuffing up a potion?  _ Me _ ? I’m sorry but I know  _ for a fact _ that this potion was damn near as perfect as you can get, thanks very much.”

Keith just shrugged, fiddling with one of his sleeves. “Doesn’t change anything, nothing happened.”

“So what, you don’t… feel weirdly attracted to me, have a sudden, undying crush or urge to kiss me or anything?”

“I mean…” Keith went red. “...no? As I said, nothing  _ unusual _ happened.”

It took Lance a moment to piece it all together, and once he had, he still wasn’t sure if he was right. 

“So you… so you…”

A shy nod. “Yeah.”

“Since when?” Forgetting his mostly dry bowl of cereal in the kitchen, Lance sat back down in his spot on the sofa. 

“I had a crush on you after you moved in, and then I guess over time it just… grew. I’m sorry.”

“Nonono why are you apologising?” Lance leant over, resting a hand on Keith’s shoulder.

Keith brought his knees up to his chest, resting his cheek on them and looking away from Lance. 

“I’m apologising because I just told you I’ve been in love with you for practically as long as we’ve known each other, and it’s a lot to dump on someone, especially someone who’d never like me back.”

“Keith… that’s not true.” 

“What do you mean?” He swapped cheeks suddenly, face now  _ very _ close to Lance’s. 

Well. Now was as good a time as any, wasn’t it?

Taking a breath, Lance tucked Keith’s bangs behind his ear, fingertips lingering on the point for a moment or two. 

“I like you.”

Keith was quiet, simply looking up at Lance. 

“I like you a lot. I wouldn’t say love, not yet, but… but I really like you, and I want to come to love you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, fangs, I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> So you made it! I hope you liked it, hope it was fluffy enough and all the good stuffs.
> 
> Please please pretty please leave comments and kudos, or come find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/galactiklance) or [Tumblr](https://galactiklance.tumblr.com/) or [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/galactiklance/) and yell at me. 
> 
> Another huge thanks to Jo, I love you.


End file.
